[ecrea] PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle / Now available

PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle

Now available



Edited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle 
considers how large-scale events have challenged conventional 
understandings of audience, spectacle, and what it means to “view” art. 
The recent success of Nuit Blanche, for instance, breeds a paradox: in 
one night, the number of visitors often surpasses the attendance at 
major art institutions for an entire year. Despite such numbers, this 
popular exhibition format has so far yielded limited scholarship, which 
PUBLIC 45 seeks to engage. This issue on Civic Spectacle analyzes the 
greater context of performances that includes the time-honoured cultural 
forms of festivals and parades along with more spontaneous and 
oppositional events, such as flash mobs and activist interventions. 
Indeed, beyond Nuit Blanche, these types of civic spectacles respond to 
a situation of urban crisis: the loss of sustainable jobs as tourism and 
service industries replace manufacturing, the weakened political clout 
of cities as suburbs and exurbs become wealthier and more populous, and 
the challenges to retain a sense of community in the stressed 
circumstances of the downtown core.



Seventeen articles and projects in this issue are organized into three 
themed sections. “Nuit Blanche” considers iterations in Toronto, Paris 
and Halifax. Addressing how these events give prominence to insomnia, 
social media, urban poetics and neoliberal “civility,” the articles 
outline distinctive affective states and their ethical implications. The 
second section, “Cityscapes,” scrutinizes the material conditions 
undergirding these massive public art events—the buildings and streets 
that are appropriated and transformed by artists and residents, even 
symbolically devoured, as in Ali&Cia’s urbanophagy projects. The last 
section, “Performing Citizenship,” focuses on questions that could be 
said to inform many of the articles throughout. What kinds of 
subjectivities and political positioning do civic spectacles ask 
participants to embody? What range of responses ensue? The authors here 
focus on both officially sanctioned spectacles (the Olympics) and 
examples of resistant public actions (DIY technoculture).



Articles by Heather Diack, Philip Glahn, Max Haiven, Catherine Howell, 
Lois Klassen, Carmen McClish, Charlotte McIvor, Joel McKim, Siobhan 
O’Flynn, Matthew Reynolds, Abigail Susik, Andrew Wasserman, and Fiona 
Wilkie.



Projects by Simon Cohen and Alicia Ríos, DisplayCult, The Freee 
Collective, and Eric Moschopedis.



Reviews by Brian Curtin, Jonathan Baxter, Lewis Kaye, and Marc James 
Léger, and a column by Ian Balfour.



240 pages, 100+ colour images

Print ISSN: 0845-4450
Online ISSN: 2048-6928



Available in select newsstands, bookshops, libraries, and online: 
http://www.publicjournal.ca/45-civic-spectacle/



ABOUT

PUBLIC is a bi-annual interdisciplinary art journal based in Toronto 
founded in 1988 by the Public Access Collective. It is committed to 
existing as an intellectual and creative forum, providing a space for in 
depth perspectives on the theoretical and critical issues that intersect 
with art and visual culture.



PUBLIC gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the 
Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and York University.





Aleksandra Kaminska

Managing Editor

PUBLIC Art Culture Ideas

Toronto, ON

(public /at/ yorku.ca) | www.publicjournal.ca

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